The Scarlet Claw (1944)

Directed by Roy William Neill. Starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Arthur Hohl, Paul Cavanagh, Gerald Harner, Kay Harding, Miles Mander, Ian Wolfe, David Clyde, Victoria Horne, Gertrude Astor.

Good entry in Universal’s Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes series, the eighth of fourteen. Skeptical Holmes investigates attacks by a “monster” around the marshland village of La Mort Rouge, a name which lives up to the gloomy and macabre atmosphere of its environment. An involving mystery, not based on a specific Arthur Conan Doyle story, although it owes a debt in supernatural ambience (and a plot point or two) to “The Hound of Baskervilles”, which was the first book adapted for this series back in 1939. Fine supporting cast includes Paul Cavanagh as an irritable aristocrat and Arthur Hohl as a local innkeeper. Bruce’s bumbling, blundering ways as Dr. Watson are gratefully restricted this time out; his one “big” moment occurs in the aftermath of the climax, an appropriate form of comic relief. Doleful, fog-saturated photography by George Robinson.

73/100